That image is something you may see in your Titanfall 2 multiplayer game. Buffalo Wild Wings will be offering codes for exclusive in-game “nose art” to decorate your mechs. Amble over to your local wingery starting on October 28th to November 30th and you can grab some cosmetic DLC with your bourbon honey chicken wings. Oh, but the cross-promotional fun doesn’t stop there!
In addition, Buffalo Wild Wings will feature Titanfall 2 branding and game imagery on takeout boxes, napkins, as well as a co-branded Mountain Dew, Buffalo Wild Wings Collector’s Edition 32 ounce takeout cup.
Finger licking! Titanfall 2 launches on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC on October 28th.
Stardock’s Sorcerer King was a clever turn-based title that started with the simple premise of “What happens after you lose a normal 4X game?” Pitting players against an all-powerful Sorcerer King that had apparently just “won” a strategy game before the player came along was a great way to shake up the formula, and allowed the developers to tighten the experience into something with a clear antagonist and goal. Sorcerer King: Rivals looks like it pushes that concept even further. The standalone expansion comes with two new playable races, new sovereigns, spells, units, and abilities. New boss lieutenants will challenge your ascension. The biggest new obstacle for players could be the integration of the Steam Workshop for new scenarios and custom quests. Time for the cat hair mustache quest to make a comeback!
Sorcerer King: Rivals pre-orders begin on August 25th. Owners of Sorcerer King will get a discount on the expansion.
The upcoming Death Star expansion for Star Wars Battlefront will feature space battles. In the new Battle Station mode players will fight each other in iconic Star Wars spacecraft near the legendary Imperial base.
The alphabet soup of filthy Rebel space ships will try to destroy the loyal Imperial defenders in their stalwart TIE Fighters. If the traitorous Rebellion breaks through, their infantry will attempt to steal an innocent droid from its rightful place in the Death Star. New heroes Bossk and Chewbacca can face off during this phase of the battle – a contest that will undoubtedly end in a merciful death for the woolly smuggler beast. (It has to be better than having a moon fall on you.) Should the brave Stormtroopers fail, the fight will go back into space with Rebels futilely navigating the impossibly fortified Death Star Trench while The Emperor’s chosen emissary, Darth Vader himself, dispenses with them. Go home, Rebels. You’re drunk. Like you’re going to get a photon torpedo into a vent the size of a womp rat.
The Death Star expansion for Star Wars Battlefront is coming in September.
Among Ubisoft’s Gamescom announcements was the Calling All Units DLC for Tom Chick’s Official GOTY 2014, a.k.a. The Crew:
Players will hit the road as a cop or street racer to prove their driving skills and team up in crews to take over the USA. This new police-chase fantasy will have a deep impact on the gameplay and on players experience all over the gigantic open world offered by The Crew. Players will be introduced to this brand-new police versus racer gameplay through a twelve-mission story that will allow them to build up their own cop style and tactics, ride in fully tuned police vehicles and collect new parts, vehicles and XP.
Oh, so it’s just some new multiplayer mode that forces you to wait in a lobby for a full team? In other words, something separate from what makes The Crew great: it’s open world?
In this always-on, all-terrain confrontation, each side will rely on a set of special abilities and a great variety of vehicles as they race across the US. As a member of the police, players chase street racers across the US in frantic, high-risk pursuits. They will perform successful arrests and get their hands on a wide range of exclusive cop vehicles, from exotic supercars to legendary motorbikes or indestructible SUVs, fully tuned up with police livery and light bars. Players who prefer to hit the roads as a racer will take off with cargo for heart-pounding rides and high rewards. Chases can be triggered anywhere, anytime, bringing even more intensity to the multiplayer experience, already enjoyed by more than nine million players.
“Always on”? Sounds like full-blown PvP to me. Consensual PvP. Some players carry “cargo”, some players hunt down the cargo carriers, and everyone else goes about their business.
Additionally, all The Crew players will be able to take part in this frantic face-off as they will have total access to the street racer gameplay, which includes special abilities such as blinding flashbangs and unlimited nitro. All players will also enjoy the new level cap, now set to 60.
So carrying “cargo” — c’mon, Ubisoft, just be like Rockstar and call it drugs already — is available to everyone as a new means of advancement, but only folks who buy Calling All Units get to be the law.
The release date is November 29th. Ubisoft also announced a bunch of other stuff at Gamescom, but I wasn’t really listening.
Social media is confusing and annoying to people that barely understand phones without a coiled cord. Snapchat and Tinder are mind-blowing to a generation used to writing letters. Imagine how off-putting something like Pokemon GO is for the same crowd. Clayton Chowaniec understands. He’s created That Pokeyman Thing to illustrate the frustrations of trying to relate to grandkids that are all-consumed with some new-fangled phone game. It’s free and playable in your browser! No, the computer program that connects to the internet. The big “E” on the screen. Double-click it. No, click twice really fast with the left mouse button. No, the… Here.
It can be difficult to go back and watch horror from the 70s and 80s. So much of that Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper stuff, so many of those Italian movies, so many of the myriad forgettable slasher films were mean-spirited and cruel. There was no creative intent behind the cruelty other than shock. It was as pointless as it was effective. Lake Nowhere is a grisly morsel that remembers this. It very nearly keeps a straight face, but it can’t help but crack its goofy Raimi smile. Not a wink, mind you. But definitely a smile.
Of course, it tips its hand early. Since Lake Nowhere barely clocks in at 40 minutes, co-directors Christopher Phelps and Maxim Von Scoy have front-loaded it with a fake commercial and trailers. The conceit is an old VHS copy taped over…well, I don’t know what it’s taped over, but it bleeds through a couple of times. My guess is the overarching story isn’t about people who go into the woods and fall prey to a masked killer. The overarching story is some kids who shot their own horror movie on a VHS camera and then years later used the tape to make a copy of a horror movie called Lake Nowhere. You’re not watching Lake Nowhere. You’re watching a physical slice of 1982.
And not the anodyne 1982 of Netflix’s Stranger Things with its running time of eight hours and its body count of one. These are the aesthetics of 70s and 80s sex and gore, these breasts, that balding forehead, this fake blood, this sickly green cinematography and grainy film stock and questionable lighting, the tracking glitches and distorted sound and popping audio. Lake Nowhere’s low-budget texture is slick filmmaking shrewdly disguised as trash. And at its heart, it is the can-do “hey, let’s go out in the woods and make a horror movie!” enthusiasm and audacity of Cunningham, Carpenter, Coscorelli, Romero, and Raimi.
Like the famous E ticket attractions from Disneyland of yore, Bethesda hopes Nuka-World will be as popular. The final official DLC package for Fallout 4 features a post-apocalyptic theme park complete with new enemies, weapons, settlement bits, and quests. Presumably, all flavors of everyone’s favorite refreshing soda pop will be available for a modest sum throughout the park.
Nuka-World will be open for visitors on August 30th.
Rome: Total War is coming to iPad. Let that sink in for a minute. According to developer Feral Interactive, this is the “full experience” of the original game, with adjustments for a touch interface. Would-be generals will be able to run through a full campaign with eleven playable factions featuring the series’ turn-based strategic decisions and real-time tactical battles. Just like Scipio Africanus or Mark Antony, you’ll be able to drag your finger across the iPad screen to direct your troops. Veni vidi pinch-drag!
You won’t be catching anything at the 2016 Pokemon World Championships in San Francisco unless you’re there with permission to do so. Despite being open to the public in previous years, the 2016 gathering will be limited to invitees and guests. The Pokemon Company announced the new restrictions today, noting that underage attendees will be guaranteed only one guest badge for their family, friend, or guardian. Remaining guest badges will be issued to tournament entrants on a first-come-first-serve basis while supplies last. With only days until the convention, families of attendees are hurriedly revising their plans.
While the limited venue space was cited as a reason for the enhanced security, the 2015 Pokemon World Championship in Boston was marred by two men who brought firearms to the event and threatened other players. The men were convicted and sentenced to two years in jail for unlawful possession. While this incident is doubtless a partial influence on the new restrictions, the other likely contributor is the explosive popularity of Pokemon GO. The mobile game from Niantic has been a sensation at all recent crowd events including the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
The 2016 Pokemon World Championships will be held August 19th through the 21st at the Marriot Marquis Hotel in San Francisco.
Maybe you were one of the people that thought Quantum Break from Remedy Entertainment looked intriguing but you had no way to legitimately get it? Perhaps you didn’t own an Xbox One and buying the PC version was out of the question since it was a Windows Store exclusive. The myriad issues with the Universal Windows Platform application kept you from buying the mix of TV show and time-zapping shooter on PC, so you sighed and moved on. Faster than you can ask “Why is Littlefinger in this?” there’s a solution! Quantum Break: Timeless Collector’s Edition is coming to Steam on September 14th. There will even be a retail version produced with Nordic Games available for cavemen that like packaging.
As a bonus, both the retail and Steam digital versions of Quantum Break will have lower PC requirements than the UWP version.
The Stanley Parable came out almost two years ago, but it’s finally getting a boxed version fit for retail shelves. IndieBox is an outfit that specializes in taking independent games that typically don’t get a physical release, and packaging them for collectors to appreciate on their desktop. The titles get pressed onto discs and placed into an honest-to-goodness cardboard box with trinkets like we used to get back when stores carried PC games. We took the heady days of printed instructions and souvenir mouse pads for granted, but the IndieBox package for The Stanley Parable is an exquisite throwback to the kind of bland office productivity software appropriate for this game. There’s even a tie in the box, so you can roleplay as a cubicle drone.
The Bronze, about a woman who was an Olympic gymnast as a child, tanked critically and commercially. Not because women aren’t funny, although that’s always an argument always worth revisiting so you can watch some really funny movies (Bridesmaids, Sisters, Election, The Heat, Afternoon Delight, Enough Said, Muriel’s Wedding, Opposite of Sex, Pitch Perfect, Sightseers, Your Sister’s Sister, Death Proof, etc.). The Bronze tanked because women aren’t supposed to be a certain kind of funny. They’re not allowed to be as vulgar or unlikeable as men. It’s as if there’s a crassness threshold that women can’t cross. Call it a crass ceiling. Not even the shrewdly subversive Amy Schumer could break through it. Her Trainwreck script and performance carefully implied drunkenness, promiscuity, and assholishness without getting too far outside the confines of a traditional studio romcom.
Melissa Rauch will have none of that nonsense. Her character in The Bronze, which she wrote, is the character Danny McBride has made a career playing (Foot Fist Way) and replaying (Eastbound and Down) and replaying again (Vice Principals): a vulgar, self-centered, bitter, unpleasant idiot running roughshod over decent people. Rauch and The Bronze wallow gleefully, unrepentantly, profanely, comfortably in the same gutter. When her father — another meticulously underplayed Gary Cole performance — threatens to cut off her allowance, she barks, “If you cut off my allowance, I’m going to have to suck dicks in the CostCo bathroom for money.” But she’s not done. Where Danny McBride might lapse into inarticulate mumblecore, The Bronze’s athletic vulgarity sticks the landing. “Is that what you want, dad? You want me to suck on dirty dicks in a discount warehouse toilet?” If it wasn’t so raunchy, it would be poetic. Rauch twists her face into a mask of appalled rage to sell it. I hold up a little card that says 8.7. But she’s just getting warmed up.
No Man’s Sky, the highly anticipated space exploration game, launches in a few days and despite dozens of leaks from streamers buying the game early, people are still confused about the game’s activities. Part of the mystery can be blamed on No Man’s Sky itself, which as it turns out, is incomplete on the retail disc. People that snapped up the game being sold at outlets before it was officially supposed to be on shelves have been playing without the benefit of an extensive day one patch. Beyond that, the lingering question of “What is it all about?” has plagued the game since its initial reveal. Is it an aimless pastel-colored space vacation? An interstellar combat survival-thon? According to Hello Games’ studio head, Sean Murray, it’s probably not what most people think it’s going to be.
It’s a weird game, it’s a niche game and it’s a very very chill game.
Is this latest superhero boondoggle good, bad, or in between? Finally another three-way split. Thanks, David Ayer! At the 1:37 mark, check out our 3×3 about libraries.
